Two days after the saddest day of 2009, I got out of the shower with earbuds deep inside my head. Sitting on the toilet cistern is my iPod, volume low. This is how I like it, with the raindrop patter of the drum battery pulsing in bands against my gyrus. The sonic compression of my brain is how I squeeze out ideas. But don’t tell anyone else about this.

It’s our little secret.

I dry myself with a white towel. Honeyed Cat balances effortlessly on the top of the bathroom door. Her iris slits are as narrow as they can get as she stares into the sun reflecting off the hull of a boat.

At the end of Calle 13’s Atrévete-te-te, I put the iPod wheel to quick use and switch over to Múm’s Green Grass of Tunnel. I stand on the balcony that has a panorama of Biscayne Bay and let the wind buffet me. This is my life, I say to the clouds, this is what I’ve come to be, at least for the time being, for today, for this very second.

I forgot to warn you –

When the environs permit it, I avail myself of the situation and immediately give free reign to the stone philosopher in me.

Out comes half-baked existential declarations that usually hibernate in the pit of my chest, at a safe distance from people and their scorn.

But that’s just it –

We cannot reach the great pseudo-intellectual heights we are capable of reaching if we keep our recklessness at bay. To rid ourselves of dimness of thought we must walk naked – or semi-clothed – to the center of the plaza, mount the marble podium and speak. Recklessness alone can lift ideas from the bosom of our chest and carry them to a less selfish place, a place where we don’t have to endure their weight alone.

This makes sense to me, it resonates with the popular phrase as light as a feather, which has a positive connation.